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I want to identify and discuss a stealth-CW trick that I find particularly irritating: the use of (predominately left-leaning) CW positions used as examples in some other piece of work. I mostly notice this in technical articles: you might be reading an article about writing a program that prints to the console, and the example code will say something like:
I find this quite insidious: it normalizes left viewpoints in a way that's hard to argue against. If you try to say anything, you risk being accused of derailing the discussion with irrelevant politics or otherwise being a Bad Person who violates the norms of a forum. Has anyone seen any examples of this and/or successful arguments deployed against it?
In a normal environment it would have been fine. It used to be fine. Someone puts in an unrelated lefty message, someone else puts in "I <3 JK Rowling", or whatever, and it's all part of a bigger ecosystem of poking fun at each other in the "market of ideas". The insidious part is that one will get you pats on the head (as anyone who'd object to it bites their tongue), while the other gets you cancelled.
It's not so much an attempt to normalize left-wing viewpoints (which are already completely normal), it's bait. A handy way of identifying enemies. If you react to it, you've painted a target on your back.
I did, though I won't be able to find links to it anymore. And I wouldn't argue against it, because there's no winning move there. Best case you look like a humorless square, worst case you're a Nazi. The only way to do it, is to create an equal but opposite post, after ensuring you can't get cancelled, like I described above.
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